Wiikipedia

Well, that's it, I've finished reading Wikipedia. Yeah, I'm one of those people: look up something simple, see a link to something interesting, and then five hours later I'm reading about the history of Armenia and can't remember how I got there. After years of doing that, I've read the whole thing.

I may be exaggerating a bit. If I had read all of Wikipedia, I'd go on Jeopardy before telling anyone about it. And if you're interested, I did once look up how long it would take to read all of Wikipedia, and the answer is: you could never finish it, because people are adding to it faster than a person could read.

Wikipedia has been a great thing for looking up answers quickly. As I've mentioned before: I'm a great proponent of the idea that the Internet is better for curing ignorance than displaying it. But there's still a lot we could do to reduce the world's ignorance.

Okay, reading that last sentence over, I realize it's painfully obvious. I mean, even if we write-off people who don't notice or don't care about their ignorance. It would be nice if there were more tools like Wikipedia that are useful for our tiny minority that wants to learn.

For instance, Wikipedia is great for answering the who, what, where, and when, but we also need something to answer the why.

Right now, what I'd like to answer is: why are people so excited by the new Nintendo Switch? Yes, I know, it's a game console that's got a portable screen so you can play it anywhere. But that's just like Nintendo's Wii U, which was a sales disaster.

It would be great if there was a Whykipedia where you could look up the Nintendo Switch and it would tell you why it's happening, and why people think it will work this time. But there is no such thing right now, so I tried googling, "What's the difference between the Nintendo Switch and the Wii U" and I got a few articles comparing them. All I really got out of it is that it comes down to the idea that they've thought it through better this time.

I realize, for the generation that makes up most of tech journalism today, they grew up with Nintendo, so they have warm fuzzy feelings towards it that I don't truly understand. But there seems to be a general problem with technology, that we keep falling for the same ideas that don't work. I mentioned this with Microsoft and their continuous effort to make a smooth transition from the Windows interface to the Surface that hardly anyone uses to the Windows phone interface that no one uses.

So in a world where even the smart people in the tech world are unpredictably nonsensical, there's no way to understand people's motivations. A wiki repository of explanations would be really useful. I wonder why no one has done that yet.